Fanni Luukkonen (13 March 1882 – 27 October 1947) was the longtime leader of the Finnish Lotta Svärd, a voluntary auxiliary organisation for women.

The family lived on the island of Kiikel, off the coast of Oulur, where her father was a machine operator at the town's first electric power station.

[1] Luukkonen studied at the Oulu Girls' School where her class teacher was Angelika Wenell (1857–1940), a well-known advocate of pentecostalism, who had a strong influence on her future outlook.

She later wrote that "This first patriotic twinge was deepened by the continuing events of the royal years, which provided a compelling impetus to take part in the constitutional struggle.

[1] The town of Sortavala was in the Ladogan Karelia area and had been a centre of the growing Finnish independence and nationalism movement in the late 19th century, which was not approved of by the Russian authorities, whose oppression and retaliation was particularly harsh.

The faction represented land owners and the middle and upper classes, controlled rural central and northern Finland, and was led by General C. G. E. Mannerheim.

After the Civil War, Fanni Luukkonen joined the Lotta Svärd women's organisation and was elected district secretary in 1921.

Luukkonen supervised some of the most important courses at Tuusula, where a Lotta college had been founded before the war near the Civil Guard officers' school there.

In June 1940, Marshal Mannerheim appeared at one of these training courses to award Luukkonen the Order of the Cross of Liberty first class.

Finland later perceived co-operation with Germany as offering the potenil to reclaim areas ceded to the Soviet Union during the Winter War.

Two days after the beginning of Nazi Germany's Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 Soviet–Finnish hostilities resumed with start of the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

Luukkonen travelled the country from Lapland to the Karelian Isthmus, as well as over the border to the Dvina and Onega regions which had previously been Finnish territory.

[1]The terms of the peace agreement with the Soviet Union at the end of the 1941-1944 Continuation War, included the abolition of the Lotta Svärd organisation and the White Guard.

Immediately after the announcement of the Lotta Svärd disollution, Luukkonen was awarded the Order of the Cross of Liberty 1st Class with a grand star - the highest decoration ever granted to a woman in Finland.

[1] The end of the Lotta Svärd this meant a major life change for Luukkonen: she lived in Helsinki on her small pension, doing temporary translation work.